In India, traditional agriculture filled nutritional needs because it was based on mixed cropping. Millets, pulses, oilseeds, vegetables, edible uncultivated greens — all share the same space, water, time, pests, and labor. Yesudas (farmers) used a wide variety of organic techniques including composting, indigenous varieties, crop rotations, intercropping, incorporating legumes, and natural pest control.
British colonization saw extensive change in agricultural patterns in the Indian Subcontinent. Farmers were compelled to grow cash crops such as cotton, indigo, and opium for export markets, resulting in increased poverty and a reduction in land fertility. Today, though most of the landscape is industrial, you can still find pockets of farms that practice traditional mixed cropping.
India witnessed the Green Revolution in the 1950s. It changed the way agriculture was approached. Agriculture became associated with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, controlled water supply, and mechanization. All of these were seen as a ‘package of practices’ to supersede ‘traditional’ technology and to be adopted as a whole. This shift in agricultural practices introduced the concept of ‘weeds’ to the Indian agricultural landscape. Uncultivated plants, an integral part of the ecosystem of a farm, were seen as ‘unwanted plants’ because they competed with the cultivated plants for their nutrients, sunlight, and water. With the introduction of ‘weeds’ as part of the modern agricultural system, uncultivated greens were seen as a nuisance. This meant the weeds had to be dealt with, and it changed the way uncultivated greens were understood as food.